Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Preface by the Author

Acknowledgements

List of Figures and Tables



Introduction



Prologue: Two Steps from Nature to Culture

 1 From Rainbow to Rainbow Serpent

 2 From Rainbow Serpent to Dragon



Part 1 Dragons



1 What, If Anything, Is a Dragon?



2 Why Dragons? Theories from A to Z

 1 Naturalistic Theories of the Dragon: Cryptozoology

 2 Symbolic Theories of the Dragon

 3 Neo-Lamarckian Theories: The Dragon as Archetype

 4 Diffusionist Theories

 5 Other Theories



3 Dragons and Waterfalls

 1 North America

 2 The Caribbean and South America

 3 Insular Southeast Asia

 4 The Pacific

 5 Africa



4 Dragons and Thunder/Lightning



5 The Ethnology of the Dragon

 1 Central and East Asia

 2 North America and Mexico

 3 The Data



Part 2 Rainbows



6 What, If Anything, Is a Rainbow?

 1 Rainbows: Familiar and Fantastic

 2 Portrayals of the Rainbow

 3 Distributional Summary



7 The Ethnology of the Rainbow

 1 How the Dragon Was Born

 2 Mysteries of the Rainbow

 3 Sunshowers

 4 The Rainbow Taboo



8 A Glimpse of the Glory

 1 Europe

 2 Ancient Near East



Part 3 Summing Up



9 Connecting the Dots



10 Conclusions



Appendix: Ethnic Groups Cited

References

Index

About the Author

Robert Blust (1940-2022) was a Professor of Linguistics at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He was, and continues to be, the preeminent scholar of Austronesian comparative linguistics. An enormously prolific scholar, Blust had nearly 300 publications. In addition to being a world-famous linguist, he was also an avid writer of poetry.